‘Pillar Posts’ are round-ups and explanations of key ideas and texts that have been and continue to be discussed at HogwartsProfessor. With more than two thousand posts in our archives spread out over twelve years of blogging, we need an easily accessible file where serious readers can find — without hours of hunting — the articles they want to read. These Pillar Posts will find a home on the left sidebar of the HogwartsProfessor homepage and I’ll update them regularly.
The first post to go up was a collection of Literary Alchemy links. Next came the Pillar listing the rapidly growing set of posts on the Crimes of Grindelwald movie. Today I want to pull together what we’ve written here about the first film in the Fantastic Beasts franchise since its release in 2016.
It may seem irrelevant to revisit the first movie now that we have Crimes of Grindelwald but Fantastic Beasts 1: Newt Goes to New York will almost certainly be reflected in the third film and the finale, Beasts 5. As we’ve seen in Harry Potter and the Cormoran Strike mysteries, Rowling writes her series in rings, a structure that features an axis bisecting the story circle that connects first-middle-and-final parts (for a five film package, that means 1-3-5).
I focused most of my attention in 2016 on trying to come to something approximating Rowling’s final “shhoting script,” something that had to be recreated from the Heyman-Yates mish-mash of a movie, the published screenplay, and the many deleted scenes. As Rowling said Steve Kloves told her, the agony of making a movie out of a Rowling novel or script is “fitting the woman to the dress,” i.e., forcing the natural figure into the mechanical formula of blockbuster movies. I’ll let you judge how successful I was in sorting out and pasting in the scenes that we know were not included in the released movie.
Text-discovery was my focus but there was a lot more going on, from the MuggleNet Academia and Reading, Writing, Rowling podcasts to discussion of the movie’s ring structure and Christian content, not to mention the posts by Beatrice Groves, Wayne Stauffer, and HogwartsProfessor faculty Louise Freeman and Elizabeth Baird-Hardy. You can find it — close to forty posts! — all neatly organized just after the jump.
As with all of the Pillar Posts, please let me know if a link is not working or if I have inadvertently left out an article. Enjoy!
Unlocking Fantastic Beasts: Finding the Text
Preface 2: Comparing the Original Screenplay with the Actual Film: What the Film Makers Left Out, Changed, or Deleted (with Kelly Loomis)
Part 1: J. K. Rowling, Screenwriter — Who is Working for Whom?
Part 5A: So What? The Found Text and Its Meaning
- 5.1 The Story of the Text We’re Looking For
- 5.2 Theseus the Hero and Newt Scamander
- 5.3 Jacob Kowalski: Is He Bigger than Newt?
- 5.4 The Grindelwald-Credence Relationship
- 5.5 Lumos and the Barebone Orphanage
- 5.6 Dougall, Intratextuality, and Readers
- 5.7 Fantastic Beasts and the Beasts Within
Part 5B: The Shooting Script — A Corrected Text for Serious Readers
Part 5C: Conclusions and Predictions
Interpretation and Speculation: Ring Structure, Christian Content, Elder Wand, Etc.
- On the Story Structure of Fantastic Beasts: Is It a Ring?
- On the Deep Back Story Revealed in Fantastic Beasts
- On the Christian Content in Fantastic Beasts — and the New Controversy
- Rune Magic in ‘Fantastic Beasts’? I wish
- Why the Film Franchise Cannot Win a Major League ‘Oscar’
- Nicolas Flamel to Appear in the Sequel? Don’t You Believe It!
- Who is the Death Stick’s Master? The Elder Wand and Fantastic Beasts
Podcasts:
- Fantastic Beasts Ring Composition: A ‘Reading, Writing, Rowling’ Podcast (with Katy McDaniel and Brett Kendall)
- On Rowling’s Missteps and Misappropriatrions in ‘History of Magic in North America‘ (with Dr. Amy H. Sturgis and Allison Mills, MuggleNet Academia podcast)
- The HogwartsProfessors Talk ‘Fantastic Beasts’ (with Louise Freeman, Emily Strand, and Elizabeth Baird-Hardy; MuggleNet Academia podcast)
- Eugenics in American History and Fantastic Beasts (with Professor Chris Gavaler of Washington and Lee University; MuggleNet Academia podcast)
Louise Freeman’s Fantastic Beasts Posts:
- Fantastic Beasts Review
- Not all Fantastic Beasts are Fictional
- Is an Obscurus the Opposite of a Patronus?
- Could Fantastic Beasts be Doctor Dolittle with a Wand?
- JK Rowling and her Fantastic Beasts
Elizabeth Baird-Hardy’s Fantastic Beasts Posts
- Throwback Thursday with Narnia, Newt Scamander, and Fantastic Beasts: Part I
- Throwback Thursday with Narnia, Newt Scamander, and Fantastic Beasts: Part II
- Pack Your Bags! Newt Scamander’s Fantastic Beast-y Suitcase, Hermione’s Handbag, and their Literary Relatives
- Five Spoiler-Free Reasons Potterphiles will Love Fantastic Beasts
- Thanksgiving Thoughts on Terrific Treats from Fantastic Beasts!
- Fantastic Beast Flashbacks: The Five Things We Want to Know about What Happened BEFORE Newt’s NY Adventure
- Fairies and Wizards? A Midsummer Night’s Dream and What We Might Expect from Crimes of Grindelwald
Guest Posts:
- Wayne Stauffer: Names in Fantastic Beasts
- Beatrice Groves: On ‘Nagini Maledictus’ – Literary Allusion in Fantastic Beasts
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